Stellar Lumens (XLM) News and Analysis | BlockNation Crypto Podcast #18

BlockNation's Crypto Podcast

What is Stellar?

Stellar is an open source protocol for exchanging money. It is a decentralized peer-peer cryptoc8urrency. Stellar focuses on payments between merchants and people. Stellar was founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb.

Why is Stellar trending right now? Stellar has been in the spotlight recently following a couple of big announcement including hiring a new CEO, several partnerships, and new services.

What is “World Wire”? World Wire is a blockchain based payments system using the Stellar network to settle and clear payments across global borders, using XLM as its native currency. It is active in 72 countries around the world. World Wire aims to innovate the banking sector and allow banks to use its existing blockchain to provide services for customers without creating their own blockchain. Also, it can provide these services for a very low fee.

Key Partnerships

IBM - Stellar has partnered with IBM for several years and they are working together to create innovative banking solutions, such as World Wire which was released last September. They have partnered with 6 major financial institutions to use their World Wire platform for new banking services.

Deloitte - A micropayment system that decreases the cost of smaller transfers and offers incremental payment options to customers.

Tempo - A remittance network designed to allow people to send money to different countries quickly, for a fraction of a cent. Facilitate low-cost payments between different currencies.

Thune / Western Union. Thunes and Western Union formed a partnership to upgrade their cross border payment system. Thune has partnered with Stellar since 2018, thus making them a trio of partners. Strong Leadership Stellar hired Denelle Dixon who was the COO at Mozilla. This is a solid hire as Mozilla has been one of the leading global companies in software and internet development. Arms race in the blockchain baking sector? With Stellars new services and partnerships, JP Morgan’s stable coin, Ripple, Telcoin, and other blockchain projects, it appears there is an all out race to develop new technologies to improve banking. Is it that banks are realizing their current services are dated and losing an edge to developing technologies?